What Maroons…

Israel says the Humanitarian Relief Fund (IHH) is a radical Islamic and anti-American group that has been linked to Al Qaeda.

IHH contributed aid worth about $10 million to the convoy, including banned building materials like cement, tiles and steel. It also provided three of the boats, including the one that was ultimately raided, the Mavi Marmara.

Sorry, but the ties to al Qaeda aren’t as strong as those of the Reagan administration, and the US backed Bosnia in that war. But that’s real history so it will probably be ignored, like the fact that Hamas “seized power” by winning a democratic election supported by the Hedgemony and Israel.

I don’t imagine Israel would care to explain why building materials are a threat, along with all of the stuff that Badux notes are banned.

Seriously. That’s what an Israel apologist posted, regarding why building materials were banned.

At least Israel’s apologists have a vaguely plausible explanation for the building materials ban. The bans on Coriander of Mass Destruction, Chickens of Biological Warfare, and Canned Fruit of Genocide, on the other hand, clearly have nothing to do with the safety of Israel, and everything to do with an illegal collective punishment of a civilian population for the crimes of a few dozen criminals involved in firing rockets at Israel.

Personally… I’d go with Ricin. You can ask your Russian friends, it’s an old favorite of theirs! 😉 *sigh*

I’m just waiting for a Palestinian raid on one of the *secret* US WMD hidey holes, maybe one of the big dirty nukes. Given the level of US security in recent years, I’m sure the triggers will be right next door (or even in the same building), and the arming codes on a post-it note in someones office! 😆

The Israeli apologists are lamest clowns on the planet. They surpass Southern Republicans in their bigotry, and feed on hate. In the light of the history of Jews, they should die of shame for what Israel is doing.

Castor beans and peach pits are cheap and effective, Kryten, and the Soviets knew cheap.

Castor beans and peach pits are cheap and effective, Kryten, and the Soviets knew cheap.

Oh yes! Don’t I know it! My Russian friends here and I used to laugh at “Stoopid Amerikans (generally speaking, CIA) and their massive budgets that achieve nothing…” And then, rather perversely, the USSR went on a massively stupid spending spree! What a World, indeed! *shaking head* They were not only cheap, but far more effective than any synthesized toxin. There is still no antidote to Ricin (at least, as far as I know these days. Been out of the loop over a decade…) *shrug*

The nine bodies of aid workers that the Israeli authorities returned to Turkey have now been subjected to an autopsy, and it turns out that the nine were shot 30 times altogether by nine millimeter bullets. Most of the gunshots were from very close range, and some wounded the activists in the back of the head or in the back, suggesting that they were shot as they tried to run away. Only one body had just one entry wound, apparently that of a photographer who was sitting down when shot between the eyes. Targeting photographers suggests suppression of evidence of a crime, not self-defense. Multiple shots from close range also sounds more like venting than like self-defense. If you were menaced by an advancing crowd, would you stand around shooting the same person 4 times? Would you bother to shoot anyone in the back? (Remember, the shots came from close range, so it wasn’t that people were killed accidentally at a distance when the commandos missed their close-up target).

Commandos? Shooting CIVILIANS, in the *BACK*??! WTF??! This is the exact same terrorism I killed KR criminal is Cambodia for! As far as I am concerned right now, there is no difference between Israel and the Khmer Rouge!

You know, I was joking about that *Ricin* comment… But not any longer.

Anger remained deep in the Turkish public according to polling, with over 60% wanting stronger Turkish government action against Israel. One pollster said, “The public is in such a state that they almost want war against Israel.” Even more scary, some Turkish intelligence analysts and officers appear to be entertaining a conspiracy theory that Israeli intelligence, Mossad, is hand in glove with the Kurdish Workers Party (PPP) terrorist group in its bombings of eastern Turkey.

There was a protest of about 6,000 leftists in Israel. They denounce the ultra-orthodox (Shas, Netanyahu government) as ‘Israeli Taliban’. So I guess some Israeli’s are smart. I doubt they will be able to do anything in time.

Just about the only friend Israel has left is the USA. And that won’t be a good thing for the USA.

The problem in the Soviet Union was that the government lost control of the design bureaus. The tail started wagging the dog. There was no need for multiple main battle tanks, for example, but they happened anyhow because multiple design bureaus had designs they wanted produced and both had too much influence inside the government to be told no. And of course the Energia rocket and shuttle were expensive unnecessary boondoggles from day one. Add to that the fact that Communism has always had difficulties with the Intermediaries Problem (that is, technology which requires a lot of intermediary technologies is hard to handle the resource allocation for outside of a market economy, thus why the USSR had great schools — no intermediaries between teacher and student — but lousy cars, which require a number of technologies to be integrated into the final result) and clearly the Soviets bit off more than the creaky economic system that is Communism can handle.

Regarding the civilians killed, the Israeli government claims there were no civilians on that boat, only terrorists, who were treated the way terrorists ought to be treated. At which point my mind boggles. A photographer is a terrorist? What, he’s going to bomb Israel with Photographs of Mass Destruction?! Bryan’s point about the lame-ness of Israeli apologists’ excuses decidedly applies here.

Regarding the PKK: Mossad *did* covertly support various Kurdish groups when the Kurds were at war with Saddam, a fact which the Turks were aware of and unhappy about but there were sufficient reasons to cooperate militarily with Israel that they grudgingly allowed it to pass. Kurdish groups are also at war with Iran at the moment, another regime that Israel would love to destabilize. One wonders if the Turks perhaps know something that the rest of us don’t know…

In general I would make the point that the Turks never share all they know with anyone. Information sharing on the Soviet problem was a very complicated dance that was way above my paygrade. I wondered if there was ledger somewhere that was used to balance the information traded, because everything seemed to require a swap.

As a side note to your comment on “intermediaries”, Badtux, the US probably had better tracking on what stuff was in what trains than the Soviets ever had. Things would break down and train would be left on a siding and get “lost” for months. The transportation system sucked beyond the infrastructure problems.

Competing groups would “borrow” supplies and parts from others, some times to complete their projects, or other times to simply delay someone else’s products. It played hell with analysts’ time-lines. They were more destructive of their own progress than any outside agency.

I assume that Israel supports the MEK, the same way the Hedgemony did, which was another problem for US-Turkish relations while strengthening Turkish-Iranian relations.

It is extremely difficult to claim you were being attacked by people you shoot in the back at close range. Nothing the Israelis release seems to stand up to any type of examination. It is almost as if the Israelis want people to hate and mistrust them. The efforts are approaching the bizarre and delusional. They seem to be taking instruction from Glenn Beck.

I think the only person who could keep control of the design bureaus was Stalin, for the simple reason that if one of the bureau heads ticked him off, they knew it was a one-way trip to Siberia. Which of course added its own inefficiencies, but still, once Stalin was gone, the whole system slowly slid from being a “command economy” to being anarchy, until the final collapse.

Ah yes, the Turks. One thing I’d like to remind those who remember the Ottoman Empire is that present-day Turkey was founded by the one general who ever beat modern Western armies and ole Kemal Ataturk’s visage still glares at you all over the place — dead, but not forgotten. They don’t trust the West because they had to fight off the West to gain their independence after WW1 (thus why Ankara is the capital — in the interior, easily defensible, the center of Ataturk’s resistance against the Western occupiers after WW1 — rather than the pre-war capital of Istanbul), they’re closely connected to the West because that’s how Ataturk beat the West (by adopting their “best practices”) but decidedly don’t trust it. On the other hand, I am still recalling American fighter pilots dying over Lebanon because the Israelis conveniently “forgot” to tell the Americans about some Syrian SAM batteries and how to jam them… there is distrust, then there is actual malice. Israel crosses that line wayyyyy too often for my tastes, and it’s nothing new.

…These days, German Jews like the Jarosches are displaying new self-confidence about their future in the country that – within living memory – perpetrated the Holocaust.

“Twenty years ago, this would have been impossible in Berlin,” said Siegfried Jarosch, a real estate agent born and raised in the German capital. “But today we have an amazing Jewish infrastructure with kosher butchers, bakers, Jewish schools and several synagogues.”

The Jarosches – three generations of German Jews living under one roof – are immersed in Berlin’s Jewish community life. Siegfried is on the board of the Pestalozzistrasse Synagogue in Berlin’s western Charlottenburg district, his daughter and son, Joshua, 4, go to the Jewish kindergarten and elementary school, and his wife, Conny, 42, keeps a kosher kitchen at home.

Since the German government relaxed immigration laws for Jews following reunification in 1990, tens of thousands of Jewish migrants have come here, mostly from the former Soviet Union.

According to the Central Council of Jews in Germany, an estimated 250,000 Jews now live in the country, with some 110,000 of them registered religious community members.

Before 1990, only 23,000 Jewish community members lived in Germany, according to the Central Council.

“In 2005, more Jewish immigrants came to Germany than to Israel,” said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council. “Without immigration, most of the Jewish communities would not exist anymore,” he said, adding that about 200,000 Jews left the former Soviet Union for Germany since the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989…

I managed to have a chat with a Jewish friend of mine here. Was interesting. He said there is a lot of anger within the Jewish community here, and around the World. He likens the Likud to Jews what the Taliban are to Muslims. I’ve seen that reference a couple times now in my searches. This is going to get very interesting I think!

LOL Yeah… The Brit’s wouldn’t allow Me to build aircraft after the war, so they decided to build tri-wheelers! I often wondered why they chose that… 🙂

These days, they are back in the plane biz. 🙂 They had some truly imaginative people working there in the 30’s-40’s. I wonder what they could have achieved if they had been allowed to continue. 🙂 My German uncle (by marriage – He was a Merchant Ship Captain turned German Navy Captain) once told me that Messerschmitt engineers that were *expatriated* to the USA (they had no choice or say in it) were responsible for the Bell X-15 and other USAF aircraft after.

Actually, about all that Me supplied was a nameplate and some canopy expertise, which Me was paid handsomely for.

The X-1 and X-2 were Bell before they shifted to helicopters, but the X-15 came out of North American. Based simply on visible design, I would think that the Me guys had more of an impact on British aircraft manufacturers than the US, because the Brits were better positioned to take immediate advantage of the information. People forget that Britain was moving faster than the US in aircraft design and had jet aircraft before the US.

There is also a good deal of visible evidence that some of them “decided to work” with Yakolov.

Well, I always found it curious that the USA actually ended up with most of the *expatriated* German brains. I always wondered what the deal was with the Brits. The US Still screwed the Brit’s over WW2 anyway, so it wasn’t a very good deal! Maybe it was the final real price for the USA to enter the war, with Pearl Harbor the final excuse. Actually, the USA was involved in the War from about 1940 in the form of billions of $ of aid to the British and French ($42 bln by 1945) at fairly high interest rates (of course!) 😉 😀 This was an interesting read (as to accuracy… The truth is somewhere in there!): 😉

The key is the Russian Army and the definite fear of falling into their hands. The US Army was at the right place at the right time to scoop up a lot of scientists.

The biggest problem for the UK in the aftermath was the money to do further research. They were in a commanding lead in jet aircraft and computers, but money was needed for a lot of other things, like rebuilding cities that had been bombed.

Found this interview in Der Spiegel with Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz:

Relations between Israel and Turkey are strained to the breaking point following last Monday’s raid by Israeli forces on an aid convoy heading to the Gaza Strip. Former Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz told SPIEGEL that Turkey could have helped prevent bloodshed, but that Israel is ultimately to blame.

"A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them."

Mark Twain

"There are two novels that can change a bookish 14-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

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